At its core, this exquisite debut novel is the story of a beautiful friendship. It is also a riveting mystery, in which its setting, the swamplands of Eatonville, Fla.; its era--a time when the Jim Crow laws ruled the South--and the innocence and mythology of childhood all play a part. Finally, this masterful novel imagines, through its integration of carefully researched details, the childhood that shaped Zora Neale Hurston, and suggests how the seeds were planted for the woman who would become a groundbreaking anthropologist, folklorist and novelist at the center of the Harlem Renaissance.
Carrie Brown, Zora's best friend, narrates the story with the benefit of hindsight ("It's funny how you can be in a story but not realize until the end that you were in one"). Her voice makes a striking contrast to Zora's ("Zora didn't have any trouble telling a fib or stretching a story for fun," Carrie observes). Carrie tells it like it is, and wastes not a word. From the beginning, she metes out information in a way that invites us to piece together the mystery at hand and also the complex world outside of Eatonville ("the first incorporated all-black township in the United States," an endnote explains). Carrie begins their story just before the start of fourth grade. She and Zora always seem to be at the right place at the right time for an adventure, and they lag behind a group of men following an out-of-town welder who plans to best the legendary alligator Ghost. Unfortunately, Ghost gets the best of the welder, then disappears. Zelda will not discuss the death of the welder, but in the schoolyard, she spins a tall tale about Mr. Pendir, a carpenter by trade, who once outsmarted three gators and lives near the Blue Sink, her favorite swimming hole. She claims she saw him standing on his porch with the head of an alligator: "Mr. Pendir is a gator man--man body, gator head!" How else does one explain Ghost's disappearance?
Along with the "gator man," Zora and Carrie endow their surroundings with the stuff of legend. In addition to Blue Sink, of which Zora, Carrie and their friend Teddy now have a healthy fear, they also invest Loving Pine with a larger-than-life quality. "Just because something can't talk,... doesn't mean it can't give and get love," explains Zora. The Loving Pine becomes a central backdrop for many of the children's awakenings. It's where they first meet a traveling turpentine worker, Ivory; and it's also where they later come to understand the puzzle pieces of their mystery. Ivory strums his guitar to a song about "the looking and finding folks." Carrie asks him which he is, and Ivory responds, "Sometimes the problem is trying to find somebody who don't know they lost or don't want to be found." They warn Ivory to "be careful of... gators in these parts." He thanks them and goes on his way, saying, "I've outlived creatures much more dangerous than old gators." In their "community without strangers," as Carrie puts it, Ivory stands out.
Zora, Carrie and Teddy are surrounded by loving adults. Chief among them is Joe Clarke, who runs Eatonville's general store, and also acts as the town marshall. Joe Clarke, along with Zora's father, were among those who tried to save the welder from Ghost, and it's while Zora and Carrie are at his general store that they learn a body was found dead by the railroad tracks: "It don't have no head.... Probably a turpentine worker," reports Chester Cools. A smashed guitar was found a few feet away. And then Zora and Carrie know: It was Ivory. "Only a monster could do what was done to Ivory," Carrie thinks. Mr. Ambrose, "the old white man who had helped deliver Zora into the world," is another trusted adult. His presence at Zora's birth grants him a privileged position in the Hurston family and in Eatonville in general. Like Joe Clarke, he helps gently guide Zora through the complexities of the clues she's uncovering. Both Joe Clarke and Mr. Ambrose's exchanges with the children attest to their concern for their safety as well as the integrity of Eatonville.
Each chapter unspools like a scene on the stage. Simon and Bond reveal the tensions between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South for the first time at the Hurstons' dinner table, when Zora shatters the upbeat mood by bringing up the body they found by the tracks. Mr. Hurston refuses to discuss it; she insists. The situation escalates to the point where he says, "Do you--do you think you white?" Zora responds, "Saying what I know and wanting answers... doesn't make me white. I know who I am. I'm Zora." And a trip to Lake Maitland to buy towels reveals a more insidious side of race relations, both in Mrs. Hurston's behavior in the shop (when the shopkeeper asks Mrs. Hurston who the towels are for, she says they're for some folks in town for whom she's started doing housework), and when they meet a woman named Gold. "She was the sun," Carrie thinks. Gold makes a beeline for Zora and Carrie, and Carrie thinks, "Whatever it was that made her so beautiful must have been inside of us, too." But Mrs. Hurston says after Gold leaves, "She best be careful about being too friendly with people she gave up her place with." Both of these scenes get to the heart of Zora Neale Hurston's body of work. No matter where she went or whom she encountered in her life, Hurston would remain true to her roots and to her convictions.
In the end, this is an elegant coming-of-age story. Though Zora and Carrie's childhood is steeped in myth, myth alone cannot explain the death of Ivory or the horrors of racism. There are indeed creatures more dangerous than old gators. The girls' pursuit of the truth does not end there; knowing the truth, they are equally committed to doing what they must to keep Eatonville safe. And that changes them irrevocably. As Mrs. Hurston tells them, "The folks who protect where they come from always have a place to come back to. But more than that--they always have a place to take with them." What powerful armor for a child to carry with her. With this gracefully crafted book, Simon and Bond demonstrate not only how Hurston carried that armor with her throughout her life and work, but how all of us can, too.--Jennifer M. Brown
Image: Alan Lomax, "African American Children Playing Singing Games, Eatonville, Florida." June 1935.